ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family

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From WordPress.com:

We’re excited to announce that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired the popular WordPress plugin ActivityPub.

This innovative plugin brings a whole new level of social networking to your website by integrating it with the wider federated social web. When installed, the plugin allows you to easily share your content and interact with users on Mastodon and other platforms that also support the ActivityPub protocol.

Just as Automattic aims to do with all of our products, this plugin helps to decentralize the web, break down silos, and foster a more connected online ecosystem.

This is a great start and I love the idea of allowing you to not only publish easily to ActivityPub networks like Mastodon, but also allow comments to your posts to show on your site. I hope that eventually we could see more bidirectional sync. I had mentioned this a while back on Mastodon, and would love this plugin to eventually evolve into a space where I could do the following:

  1. All blog posts are pushed to Mastodon
  2. Comments on the post are brought into my site
  3. Non-reply posts made on Mastdon are brought in as a WordPress ‘Post Type’

Fingers crossed we see continued innovation in this space.

Maybe Zoom Parties Weren’t So Bad

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From Clive Thompson:

But during COVID, while my socializing was purely online, it was broader. I spent time hanging out with far-flung peers, like my friends in Canada who I don’t see nearly often enough. Or, after my mother passed away in the summer of 2020, her side of the family held a 2021 memorial online, and it was amazing to see all my oodles of cousins, many of whom I haven’t been in the same room with for years and years.

I can relate to this. My social network was briefly much broader and had more frequent interactions than it does now that things are back to normal. Almost nightly I’d play games online with friends, hop on zoom parties to watch movies we’ve seen a hundred times, or simply happy hours.

If I’m being honest, the part I don’t miss is the work-mandated ones. I feel like tons of leaders did the bare minimum to set up something “fun” to check the box and it was nothing more than a distraction.

Stark’s Simple Browser Extension Will Check For Accessibility

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From Elissaveta M. Brandon at Fast Company:

For now, the browser extension focuses on physical disabilities, but the team is also working on a prototype that takes into consideration people with cognitive disabilities, including dyslexia. The ultimate goal is for all of the web to be accessible, so that anybody can navigate a website, regardless of their physical or cognitive ability. “There’s no such thing as 100% accessibility,” says Noone. “But there is such a thing as continual integration of accessibility, and that’s what we aim for.”

One of the biggest challenges for folks who care about accessibility but aren’t deep into best practices is a lack of easy-to-use tools to help make small but meaningful improvements. This seems like a great step in the right direction.

I’m happy to see their extension and tools available for a ton of platform and browsers as well. Oddly, the entire article doesn’t actually link to the extension. Here it is.

Rendering Engine Diversity on iOS

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Last week, some interesting news broke about Google and Mozilla prepping versions of their iOS browsers to use their own rendering engines rather than simply being a wrapper around Webkit, Apple’s rendering engine. If you aren’t familiar, iOS has rules that prevent browser makers like Google and Mozilla from embedding the engine that handles layout and features in their browsers. Instead, they have to use the one that Apple provides, which is called Webkit and is the engine that powers Safari. This means that the only real reason to use Chrome over Safari is the UI or features like bookmark and password sync, but other web technology differences are non-existent.

This has gotten Apple into hot water in recent years, as the overwhelming popularity of the iPad and iPhone gives Apple the power to dictate a ton about how the “mobile web” looks and acts. One imagines this possible change on Apple’s part is due to anticipated antitrust rulings & legislation against Apple mounting. Given that, it might behoove Apple to get ahead of the issue and simply relax restrictions, but either way it would appear the dam might be breaking soon.

According to Statcounter, Chrome commands about 65% of the browser market share on the desktop and mobile. One arguing in favor of allowing other rendering engines would say that there likely won’t be much of a difference in adoption numbers if Blink and Gecko are allowed to run natively on iOS, but there’s a lot to unpack about the pros and cons of such a move.

What are some of the pros of rendering engine diversity?

If Apple does this (regardless of why they do it), there are definite advantages to having more competition on iOS.

It’s likely that allowing other rendering engines onto iOS would increase competition in the market and lead to better quality and more innovative solutions. Apple has done a better job in the past few years – the Interop initiative has borne a lot of fruit for all of the major browser makers, and I’m hopeful that continues. Still, knowing Chrome or Firefox could add more pressure for Apple to up their game across the board would lead to a lot of innovation on the platform. Webkit is actually a good rendering engine in most ways but it falls short when it comes to some of the features Progressive Web Apps need. This pressure would likely force WebKit to adopt those features as well.

Users would have a greater choice of rendering engines and be able to choose one that best suits their needs. Folks could choose to use Chrome, Firefox, Arc (seriously, check out Arc) or something else if the features make more sense for them, and competitors could compete on more than just adding a few features on top of the rendering engine they are handed. In addition, this choice could lead to extensions finally making their way to non-Safari browsers on mobile. Having native 1Password integration on mobile is a game-changer and I wouldn’t entertain switching on mobile until things like that and a solid ad-blocker are available on other browsers.

This is likely wishful thinking based on what I see on the Mac (Safari runs circles around Chrome and Firefox when it coems to battery life and performance), but rendering engines may offer better performance and more efficient use of system resources than the Webkit engine, resulting in a smoother user experience. Different rendering engines may have better compatibility with different types of websites and web applications, improving the overall browsing experience. In general, many sites work best on Chrome and having fallback options when something isn’t working in Safari would be a fantastic experience for users on iPhones and iPads.

If done right, there’s a great chance we could see tons of innovation in the mobile browser space. In my opinion, Safari on iOS is a really solid browser but Apple’s incentives to prioritize some web standards (cough, PWAs, cough) might not align with their business interests (App Store and their 30% cut). Having true competition will mean that Apple will be forced to focus on the entire spectrum so that developers don’t go “Chrome only”, thus sidelining Safari on mobile platforms completely.

Are there any cons?

There are definitely cons, but the biggest one is the potential decline of WebKit as a first-class citizen. Organizations often can’t or won’t be bothered to have a testing strategy around multiple browsers, but instead choose to support the dominant browser (Chrome). Once a certain marketshare threshold gets crossed, developers and businesses will treat Gecko and Webkit like second class citizens. I don’t agree with the strategy, but locking users into Webkit/Safari on iOS & iPadOS does ensure a floor of market percentage that can’t be taken away. I do believe that a variety of standards-comptabile rendering engines should exist to keep each other in check, but creating an artificial monolopy isn’t the way to accomplish that. There are a few other risks:

Allowing other rendering engines onto iOS could potentially introduce new security vulnerabilities and make the platform less secure. Different rendering engines may have different standards for rendering web content, which could lead to compatibility issues and broken websites for users. Even if Apple does open up, I’d imagine we’ll see entitlements introduced to only allow some companies to ship their own browsers.

Also, the introduction of different rendering engines could lead to fragmentation of the platform and make it more difficult for developers to create consistent experiences across different devices. There’s also the risk that allowing other rendering engines onto iOS could decrease the control that Apple has over the platform and potentially result in a less consistent and user-friendly experience.

The biggest risk for Apple is WebKit’s decline, but that assumes they do nothing to compete. If they open things up and also invest in their platform, I’m confident engineers will continue to build toward standards and Safari/WebKit will be fine.

What do I hope happens

As a Safari user, I really hope to see increaesd competition as it should make Apple’s browser better but also gives power users an off-ramp if they need more functionality. Yes, there is a risk to opening up to allow other engines but I personally think it’s worth it. The gravity of a default experience will still draw the vast majority of iOS users to Safari and as a result force most companies to still support WebKit. The increased competition, however, should be a good thing for all consumers.

There’s a great series on browser choice on iOS that’s worth a read. I commented on this a few years ago and I still believe the same thing. Alex Russel can be correct but also have a perspective that’s very Google-centric as well. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

To Safari’s credit, Webkit has been getting a ton of investment in the past 12-18 months. I admire the Safari and Firefox teams’ focus on privacy and want them to remain as a counterweight to Google and their desire to use “standards” as an argument to push their own vision for the web on all of us. Funny how it typically involves us spending more time using the web and giving up our data in the process.

This year’s WWDC will be very interesting, as I’d imagine if we’re going to hear about changes to Apple’s browser policies, that’ll be the time they’ll roll out.

The Electric Vehicle Boom Is Bad News For Tesla

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From Jesus Diaz, Fast Company:

After a decade of being the only game in town, Tesla is entering a new era of the EV wars, which started in earnest in 2022 but will only intensify in 2023. Tesla still dominates the EV market in the U.S. today, but its lead has consistently dropped—and is expected to quickly dwindle—as legacy automakers roll out their own electric models.

Tesla’s rise to fame has been nothing short of impressive, but in a competitive market like the automotive industry their regression to the mean was inevitable. As a Tesla Model 3 LR owner, I can say that while I am happy with my car, I wouldn’t buy a Tesla for my next vehicle.

The early decision to start from the top and working your way down the price ladder was something that set them apart and helped drive the “cool” factor despite the car not being premium in ways folks paying $60–100k for a car would normally expect. They used the early dominance to build a charging network that is still unrivaled, and the battery life for their long range models is still better than most of the competition. The ongoing software update model aligned with consumer expectations in the iPhone era and was fairly unique in the indsutry. Combine that with Musk’s larger that life personality (and expectations about self driving that he’s been promising since 2014), the company earned a lot of fans (myself included!) for accelerating the move away from ICE vehicles by making something cool, approachable and futuristic. But the cracks that have always existed are much more apparent now that the rest of the indsutry is getting into the game.

Teslas are notorious for questionable build quality, which is not at the level of other $50–70k cars that I’ve driven. Personally, I haven’t had many issues on my end but I’ve experienced a few unsatisfying noises from time to time, the feel of closing doors and windows isn’t satisfying, and I wish the road noise was a bit quieter. Additionally, the company’s insistence on cramming everything into one touchscreen is a weak point, and their insistence on building every single app for their touchscreen in-house means they’re always playing catch up when it comes to other infotainment systems. Tesla’s refusal to integrate with Carplay and Android Auto, likely due to their view of those platforms as competitors, is super frustrating. And then, there’s the elephant in the room – Elon Musk. While his outspoken nature and leadership of Tesla and SpaceX was once seen as a competitive advantage, it has now become a distraction.

While Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) technology has been highly anticipated for a decade now, I don’t believe anyone will be able to deliver on it within the next 15–20 years. FSD is at level 2 or 3 out of 5 right now, and haven’t made a ton of progress. The standard “Autopilot” feature, which is basically variable cruise control and lane assistance, is quite good for level 1. Highway driving on long road trips is way better with this tech. But the rest of it? Way too many edge cases for me to be interested in trying out. Like most software, that last 20% is hard to iron out, but in this case we’re dealing with 500k beta testers playing with human life. No thanks.

To keep a market share close to what they have now, Tesla needs to scale up, fix the quality issues they have and convince nearly every current Tesla owner to buy a second vehicle when they’re ready to buy. They also can’t rely on consumers paying premium prices for EVs forever. Delivering on a true mass-market EV in the $30k range will help them maintain a lead. Oh, and crack Level 4–5 autonomy to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Hard to see that happening with all of the great options coming out from established automakers.

It’s far easier for traditional automakers to figure out how to transition their fleet from ICE to EV than it is for Tesla to become a big automaker and solve for all of the small but significant headwinds they’re facing. That doesn’t mean Tesla is going out of business or doomed to fail. What it does mean is that capitalizing on the first mover advantage in an industry without strong network effects is hard to do for long. I don’t think many automakers could have maintained Tesla’s lead for long, but it seems like Musk and Tesla are squandering it even more quickly.

Bonus reading: https://www.wired.com/story/teslas-problems-elon-musk-twitter/

Twitter and 3rd Party Apps

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From Mitchell Clark, the Verge:

Elon Musk just decided to throw all of that away. Twitter has abruptly cut itself off from that stream of ideas — the stream that produced its apps, some of its most popular features, and much of its core identity. Even if he backtracks, why would developers spend their best ideas on a company that’s burned them so badly?

Twitter was always unique in that they are one of the only social media platforms to allow 3rd-party clients to essentially re-create the entire platform’s experience. Looking back at how much those early apps made the experience what it is today is really worth celebrating, even if we knew it wouldn’t last forever. Given the fact that they never were able to push ads into those timelines, it’s no wonder that eventually they would shut Twitterrific, Tweetbot and others down.

Look! Another Post About Twitter!

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Twitter is a dumpster fire

If you’ve been living under a rock over the past 6 months, you might not be aware of the fact that Twitter is under new ownership. By most measures, it doesn’t seem to be going great. Elon Musk has taken a sledgehammer to the service since he acquired it in October, and my “wait and see” approach has turned to a “can’t look away because the train wreck is so epic” one.  Watching Elon drive Twitter into the ditch with his Free Speech Maximalism™ that’s really just shooting from the hip on every decision about content moderation, product strategy and public relations has gotten really tiresome. In fact, I hate writing about it. As a Tesla owner, I really want him to focus more on that company as shareholders seem to be revolting over his lack of attention to his cash cow. The amount of damage he’s done to his reputation and to that of his companies is pretty historic.

I’ve lurked on Twitter for a while and gotten value out of following journalists and indie developers. I’ve discovered a lot of interesting folks to follow and heard voices I likely wouldn’t have heard otherwise along the way. For me, the biggest value I get from Twitter is following a few topics: Apple/tech news, Liverpool FC, FSU/College football, and Atlanta United. I don’t post a lot, but I have cultivated sets of lists for each of those main topics that I keep up with during sporting events or big Apple news cycles. But when the company is run by a scumbag who emboldens some of the worst folks on the web and he enables policies that encourage disinformation and hate to spread, it’s hard to justify the value I do get out of the site vs supporting the societal ills Twitter magnifies.

A lot of the Apple folks have started to leave or post very infrequently but the rest, not so much. So reducing my use of Twitter does mean that I’ll be missing out on some of that commentary when watching sports or keeping up with the news. However, once you stop counting on it, it’s funny how quickly you realize you’re not getting as much value as you think you are.

What I’m doing now

I’ve deleted all of my tweets, locked my account and logged out everywhere, including deleting apps on my phone, tablet and computer. I have an account on Mastodon and check it every day or so, but I’m not posting a ton over there, either. Using a service that helps you find folks who have linked to their new homes from their Twitter profile, I’ve followed most of the people I did on Twitter but my urges to post a pretty few and far between. When I do post, engagement is higher on Mastodon vs Twitter! It definitely feels like the early days of Twitter in that way.

I’m also doubling down on RSS. I’ve used Reeder for a long time to follow a lot of the sites that I enjoy, but now I’m also following about a half dozen folks from Mastodon on there as well. It’s very easy to simply append .rss to the end of a user’s Mastodon profile and then you have a feed you can follow.

Finally, I’m going to think more about posting here with more frequency. I haven’t really touched the visual layout of the site in a long time and it’s likely I’m missing out on a lot of the visual goodies that WordPress 6.x offers. I might check out some templates and iterate on those. My hunch is that will inspire me to write a little bit more.

What I’m realizing about my professed love for Twitter

Despite the fact that I have fond memories of Early Twitter™ and derive some value out of the lists I mentioned earlier, breaking away from Twitter and spending time on Mastodon has revealed the truth most of us already know….

I don’t really need any of these sites in my life. It’s not worth it.

There are better places to get most of the info I need without wasting as much time (Techmeme, the Athletic, etc). The time I have spent on Mastodon has been fine, and I intend to keep an account over there, but I don’t see myself spending a lot of time or energy on it. Spending more time reading and writing and less time scrolling through pithy comments and performative outrage is a huge win.

Will I delete my account?

About 2 years ago, I deleted my Facebook account and haven’t missed a beat. I also still have a LinkedIn and Instagram account, although I mostly lurk. However, Twitter has always been the social media site that I’ve had the strongest love/hate relationship with. I want it to succeed but I also think most of my positive sentiment is for an era where it felt more like the “early web” and that ain’t coming back no matter who owns the service. I’m not going to delete my account but I also can’t see myself using it again for quite some time.

Using Day One to Scratch my Timehop Itch

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Over the past few years I’ve tried to curtail my use of social media. I’ve unfollowed a ton of accounts on Instagram and Twitter, deleted my Facebook account, and mostly lurk in general. I’ve also deleted all of my old posts – I know that stuff is still searchable for Twitter if you are so inclined but at least by default it’s not hanging out there.

But I’m still a person who enjoys looking back at what I was doing and thinking retrospectively. When I was a heavier user of social, Timehop notifications were something I always looked forward to and got a lot of joy out of.

What I’ve done instead is committed to posting daily in Day One. I’ve been using the app for about 10 years now but have really leaned into it in the past 3 years. My daily posts don’t have to be anything super deep or insightful, but just document what’s going on in my life or what’s in my head. The app has a really neat daily prompt feature that you can enable that will either simply say “hey remember to post”, or even tee up a post idea for you to get started with. You can create templates and tag posts to help for future discoverability as well. I also have configured a monthly retrospective notification that reminds me to reflect on my job, relationship, family life and more.

Once you start writing daily, you become more mindful of the world around you. When I don’t have anything super important going on day-to-day my fallback daily post is typically a gratitude reflection. Spending even 5 minutes thinking about what happened that day that I’m grateful for brings me immediate peace and balance but it’s also beneficial when I review them years in the future. And obviously, since it’s private and only I can read the posts, I can cover way more ground that I ever could posting on social and reviewing in Timehop.

For every day that you have a post from the same day in the past, you can get a notification to review all of those posts. I really enjoy going back through simple moments as well as family vacations I’ve taken. I try to capture the little moments that stood out from those days and they bring me a lot of joy. As a parent, I know my time with my kids is so precious and being able to reflect on those as they grow up is priceless.

I think there’s still a place for social media in your life if you are doing it right, but these days it’s pretty rare that I want to go there first. Obviously, writing on your own website has a similar “yelling into the void” aspect that something like Twitter does, but I like the pace of blogging compared to something like Twitter for the most part. I also realize I just spent a few hundred words telling you that journaling can be beneficial, but if you’re like me and get tremendous value from “looking back”, a digital journaling service like Day One will bring tremendous value to your life.

Apple Music has betrayed its most loyal listeners

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From Jason Snell at Macworld:

So this is where we are: Apple’s decision to put things that are not songs amid its collections of songs have made Apple Music’s curated playlists and algorithmic radio stations substantially worse. And at the same time, the Music app has proven utterly unable to help people who don’t want their music mixed in with promos and happy talk.

The way forward for Apple Music is simple: Turn off the ads and promos until your app is capable of letting us opt out from hearing them. But until then, if you insist on foisting this not-music on us, I curse you to an eternity of listening to nothing but the Kars for Kids jingle. You heard me.

I really hope we get the option to disable this type of content in stations and playlists. I haven’t encountered any of this so far but it’s a slippery slope to Apple Music becoming what Spotify is – an app focused on engagement instead of music.

Rediscovering the Mac

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From Federico Viticci at MacStories:

The new MacBook Pro with M1 Max is an incredible machine that takes pride in being a computer built for people who want versatility. This computer has a clear identity; you can tell it was designed by people who love the Mac for people who had grown dissatisfied with the Mac over the past few years. This machine is a love letter to win back those users. Everything about the new MacBook Pro – from the screen and battery life to the keyboard and ports and its raw performance – is a testament to how fundamental Apple silicon is and will be for the future of Apple’s computers. If you’re a longtime Mac user, there’s never been a better time to fall in love with the Mac all over again than right now. Apple silicon is the perfect comeback story for Apple’s Mac lineup.

This is a great article, written by someone who has been “the iPad guy” for the past few years. I appreciate the way he walked through what he loves about the iPad and iPadOS and how the Mac gives him options to do things the way he wants to. There’s a lot of good links to tools he’s using and wishes for what the iPad could be if it adopted some of the things that make a Mac great so I recommend giving it a look even if you’re already a seasoned Mac user.

I recently upgraded from a 2018 Macbook Pro with it’s hot, battery sucking CPU, sub-par keyboard, lack of ports and touchbar to a new 16″ Macbook Pro and it has really rekindled my appreciation of the Mac as well. I have an iPad Pro that I use a lot around the house and like Viticci wish I could do even more with it. But at a certain point I think we have to accept the fact that letting each device class be true to itself is actually the best way to work in the Apple ecosystem.